Thursday, September 29, 2011

UFOs: The Science Fiction Effect

Copyright 2011, InterAmerica, Inc.

While perusing The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Illustrated) edited by Peter Nicholls [Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1979] I was struck by how many SciFi images matched or were similar to what some notorious UFO sightings proclaimed.

More importantly, the images all antedate the sightings that have become folkloric in the UFO canon.

Witnesses of the airship phenomenon of the late 1890s and early 1900s might have been influenced by illustrations for various publications such as these:

Maybe George Adamski got the idea for his allegedly concocted flying saucer and photographs of same from something like this:

Betty Hill was remembering her contact from magazines and images like this:

Detail from clipping (above)

And Barney Hill’s recollection of what he saw came from this magazine, spotted on a newsstand perhaps:

Or maybe it was one (or both) of these clips:

(One might even posit that Reverend Gill’s sighting in New Guinea was predicated on a remembered picture he once saw, particularly like the first of the three above.)

And have those who’ve seen little men next to or inside craft gotten their "sighting" from a classic Superman segment airing on TV in 1951?

Those who’ve described flying saucers and UFOs must surely have been influenced by clips such as these or movies of the 1950s which emulated the “saucer” seen here:

And persons halted by entities shooting them with a ray gun could assuredly been interposing, by culling from their memory, such images as this:

And abductees got some of their ideas from portrayals such as this one:

Recently, UFO spotters have been indicating they’ve seen triangular craft in the skies above them, such as this:

Now either UFO witnesses are regurgitating images purloined from their memory, or UFOs and flying saucers have adopted the constructs imagined by SciFi writers and editors.